A leading global photo retailer, Snapfish was founded in 1999 by a group of entrepreneurs who wanted to create a service to provide users the ability to store, share, and print their photos online. Today, Snapfish continues as a prominent photo platform to the world’s largest pharmacy and hypermarket retailers as well as a leading direct to consumer, worldwide brand providing innovative and inspiring products and services to help customers bring their photos to life. Snapfish helps over 100 million members across 3 continents manage their most cherished memories and create personalized products from any device. Our customers entrust billions of photos with us, and we add more than a million new members worldwide each month. The holidays for Snapfish are the busiest time of year. It is when most customers are shopping on the site, and during that time website traffic hits a lot of peaks. Before Imagizer, Sna pfish utilized an in-house proprietary image optimization solution, while continuously scaling out the infrastructure to keep up with increasing customer traffic.

The internal rendering solution for images was not built with high-scale in mind. As traffic grew year over year, it was being deployed to its maximum capability, resulting in interminable efforts to maintain and high costs to increase compute power.

Solution

Flexibility, cost-effective, and sustainability were significant factors for Snapfish.

“More simplified solution, better scalability, easier to maintain: these were all the [qualities] we were looking for…pretty much checked off all the boxes after we talked to [Jack, CEO at Nventify] the first time.”

– Kenneth Lam, Engineering Manager at Snapfish discussed in an interview on why Imagizer was the ideal solution.

“We had loose calculations stating that if we needed to scale for the next holidays we would need to have 40% more compute. Forty percent more hardware costs a lot of money so we were looking to at least stay the same.”

Nventify piqued Snapfish’s interest with a solution that improved efficiency, reducing cost by decreasing the amount of computing power needed.

Result

Snapfish has a fairly large cloud running an excess of 10,000 VMs, serving images to over 100 million members of their services. The number of Imagizer instances required vs. number of proprietary renderers were at a 10 to 1. Continuing down the same path was not a feasible solution. Adding more compute towards the problem was merely a short-term answer that results in high costs and difficult maintainability. Upon implementing Imagizer into their infrastructure, Snapfish experienced an immediate, noticeable improvement in performance and a substantial amount in savings. Michael Tom, Program Manager at Snapfish, explained the performance boosts Snapfish has detected since executing Imagizer. Looking at a one-to-one comparison through bench testing Imagizer vs Snapfish’s proprietary rendering engine,

“Imagizer was significantly faster, which translated to faster load times on our web page when customers were viewing their images. But more importantly, than just raw speed in rendering a single image, Imagizer was more efficient and much better at rendering many images concurrently.”

Imagizer is the world’s only image processing engine purpose-built for eCommerce. It effortlessly accelerates page load times and makes products look their best on any device. Besides typical transformations such as resizing and formatting, Imagizer provides ecommerce specific optimizations, such as intelligent product cropping and optimized compression for mobile and desktop.